Firstly pardon me if i've yet again failed to title my question correctly.
I am required to build an app to manage magazine subscriptions. The client wants to enter subscriber data and then receive alerts at pre-set intervals such as when the subscription of a subscriber is about to expire and also the option to view all subscriber records at any time. Also needed is the facility to send an SMS/e-mail to particular subscribers reminding them for subscription renewal.
I am very familiar with python but this will be my first real project. I have decided to build it as a web app using django, allowing the admin user the ability to view/add/modify all records and others to subscribe. What options do I have for integrating an online payment service? Also how do I manage the SMS alert functionality? Any other pointers/suggestions would be welcome.
Thank You
Payment gateway integration:
Here is a detailed article about how to integrate the Authorize.net payment system into a Django project. Authorize.net is used by a few popular Django projects, including the Satchmo e-commerce store project.
django-paypal is a pluggable Django app which lets you connect to PayPal merchant services.
SMS alerts:
django-sms is a Django app which is "...designed to make sending SMS text messages as simple as sending an email." so might be a good start.
General Django
You didn't mention your knowledge level of Django itself; if you need to brush up on your Django skills I would highly recommend the book Django 1.0 Website Development.
I think it's also worth pointing out that the resources I've mentioned here were all found in the first few results of a Google search for each topic. These are the search terms I used:
django payment gateway integration
django paypal integration (because I knew of PayPal beforehand)
django sms alerts
I'd like to comment on the SMS alert part.
First, I have to admit that I'm not familiar with Django, but I assume it to be just like most other web frameworks: request based. This might be your first problem, as the alert service needs to run independently of requests. You could of course hack together something to externally trigger a request once a day... :-)
Now for the SMS part: much depends on how you plan to implement this. If you are going with an SMS provider, there are many to choose from that let you send SMS with a simple HTTP request. I wouldn't recommend the other approach, namely using a real cellphone or SMS modem and take care of the delivery yourself: it is way too cumbersome and you have to take into account a lot more issues: e.g. retry message transmission for handsets that are turned off or aren't able to receive SMS because their memory is full. Your friendly SMS provider will probably take care of this.
Related
I have been putting together a website using vanilla JavaScript, HTML, Python (Flask) and SQLAlchemy
I’m using 2 linode servers. One for the website, one for the database
I contacted linode and they unblocked the email ports, and I configured gmail to allow less-secure apps.
As of right now I am using Flask-Mail and it uses my gmail username and password to log in, and everything on the website is functioning exactly how I want it to
I only use email for 3 things:
registration confirmation
recover account password
I would like to send emails to users who sign up with site updates, once per month at the most.
However, I’ve seen many people say gmail is not good for production. My main concern is that some people have said gmail will limit your outgoing correspondence to 100 people.
I really don’t anticipate a high volume. If it exceeds 100 people I would be surprised tbh, but I want to be able to handle at least a couple thousand at the most.
I’d prefer not to get bogged down with changing all of the code and dealing with setting up a separate email server and all of that. If there’s a solution as simple as “hey use this website and user login instead of your gmail account” that would be great.
If that’s not acceptable, I understand. I’m just looking for the easiest solution that doesn’t necessarily have to be amazingly scalable at the moment.
Thanks in advance!
SendGrid is a great option. Their free teir allows you to send 100 emails per day and can scale up if you do find your application is gaining momentum. Below are the setting you'd use to configure your flask app (and flask-mail) to be able to use the service. This is derived from a tutorial that SendGrid itself provides here for configuring a flask app with flask-mail.
MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER="theemailyouwanttoshow#site.com"
MAIL_USERNAME="apikey"
MAIL_PASSWORD="SG.abcdjekfkdmd"
MAIL_SERVER="smtp.sendgrid.net"
MAIL_PORT=587
MAIL_USE_TLS=1
MAIL_USE_SSL=0
I know some SMS API, they are too expensive for the goal of my application.
Is there a way to create an SMS server to alert users, then the user can send feedbacks, my application will easily reply based on some key codes. I heard about Rapid SMS. What comes to my mind:
A modem
SIM card
A daemon software (kannel maybe)
Web application with django
Any help will be gracefull!
Twilio supports sending SMS messages, and I believe it can also carry out certain actions on receiving an SMS. It has a Python API client so it should in principle be practical to integrate it with your application.
I want to integrate Stripe, PayPal or Braintree into django project, and I want to use 'django-rest-framework`, now I'm confused about one thing and that is - Should I "touch" my database?
What I mean, I want only to charge once to my customers, it's a fee and nothing more, so should I touch 'db' or not? I'm afraid it will distort PCI Compile way of handling things. I don't know where to start beside documentation for those mentioned payments systems.
Can someone help me understand what are best practices for one time payment.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Stripe employee, so I'll only talk about Stripe here.)
Stripe makes it easy to be PCI compliant. With a proper integration, you will never have access to your customers' payment information.
A typical payment flow with Stripe can be divided in two steps:
Collect the customer's payment information, using the prebuilt Checkout form, or a form of your own using Stripe.js.
In both cases, the card information is sent directly from the customer's browser to Stripe's servers, which return a card token. You then send this token to your backend.
On your backend, you use the token to create a charge.
The token represents a card, but hides the PCI sensitive information (i.e. the whole card number and the CVC) from you.
You can find a simple tutorial for creating charges here.
If you don't plan on charging the same customer multiple times (or if you don't mind asking them to provide their card information every time), then you don't necessarily need to store anything in your own database. When you create the charge, you will be immediately informed of the result (success or failure) and can take the necessary actions.
I guess you solved the problem.
On top of that, I wanna add some information about PayPal payments when working a REST API(DRF) and a frontend server.
In this case, you can use both servers to work to secure your transactions, how?
The frontend server will take care of displaying the PayPal checkout buttons, and creating an Order in the Paypal Servers when the order has gone through. And the backend server will check the validity of the order created in the PayPal servers (using an order ID passed from the frontend after the payment has gone through), and update the database based on the PayPal response to that.
Now you could simply update your database when the payment is successful, but that would cause a security issue: people can send requests to update the database without even going through the payment.
Here is an illustration of this:
Full tutorial: https://www.kowe.io/projects/accept-paypal-payments-in-your-vuejs-and-drf-app/
I would to create a real-time web chat application using web.py in python. The problem is that I don't know how to 'architect' or design the such an app.
The way I'm thinking to implement this app is the following:
a user logs into the app.
the app connects to a controller that has a push service to push new messages and a queue service to store the new messages.
when the user sends a message, the app sends the message with an ajax call to the controller and the controller stores the message in a queue.
then the controller sends the messages in the queue to the destination user by its push service.
However I see this is a very poor design since I see a lot of ajax requests being sent here. I really don't know if there are better designs or architectures for such a service. So can you please point me toward the correct design for a real-time chat app?
Alex,
This is an understandable question, I recently thought about it when I was building my own messaging application. This is the way I broke down the app's functionality:
User registration
User authentication
Adding a new friend by username
Approving a friend
Messaging with a friend in list (Of course)
Shows online and offline users
Runs a background service in order to get messages even when the application is closed.
Uses notification area when a new message is received.
Quiting the application(kills the background service)
A few things I realized after building this application was:
The back-end architecture was a simple mixture of a simple CRUD application with pub/sub functionality. You can read up more on pub/sub systems here. Here's a simple chat application built using Ruby on Rails. You can look at it for reference, it's very well architected.
You should think about the last steps listed in the above functionality as much in the beginning of this app as you do in the end. If you architect it well in the beginning, the final steps will just fall into place! :-)
If you want to learn about concurrency and do something really cool, I suggest trying to implement some of the frameworks discussed here.
Please let me know if you have any questions!
before anything, I wanna you to Know that I'm a Complete Newbie
in these things about developing "paid" webapps. I have been reading some posts
about how to integrate Paypal's IPN with Google App Engine, and I have some questions
about the topic, the thing is like this:
I want to use a paypal's Subscribe button in my webapp (wich is developed with GAE's Python base)
so the users can subscribe to the premium version if they don't want to use the free one anymore...
I was reading that paypal can help me to manage this thing about the users control via IPN but
I have to setup that in my GAE App and I don't know how... For example:
Where the notification URL has to point to in paypal's profile configuration?
I believe it has to point to a python script in my app but I'm not sure... If
that is true, What does this python script has to have?
Then, after that's finished, How can I make paypal create
usernames and passwords for my users in order to keep non premium users out of the
"premium features"?? I don't want links to something, I need explanations on how
to implement a "Paypal Subscriptions service" inside a Python based app on GAE
in order to offer a "premium service" and a free one,
Thanks, hope you can help
To make a short answer (as I'm not exactly sure what's the scope of your question).
It's not paypal's job to maintain your data model. You need to create a database entry with your users.
For an example of that, look Google's documentation at
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstarted/usingusers.html
and, more importantly, http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstarted/usingdatastore.html
So you could create, for example, data model of this sort:
class Users(db.Model):
gae_user_object = db.UserProperty()
premium_member = db.BooleanProperty(default=False)
(of course, since you want to track subscriptions, this would be way too limited but you can get the idea).
and make the script called by Paypal trigger a function to change the value of *premium_member*...
Yes, paypal instant payment notification will call your app (you can specify somewhere in Paypal interface what uri, so you can choose what to map it to, preferably using your https appspot subdomain). Your app will need to store what paypal just sent and, before officializing anything, call Paypal servers back with the parameters that were just sent to know if the first was truly made by Paypal and not someone else.
To see a working example of that, check http://blog.awarelabs.com/2008/paypal-ipn-python-code/ and http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-python/browse_thread/thread/d76701e774e308be, even if both these example sucks (it will probably work, but don't use them as is in production as you'll notably end up with real bad error management).